Just the other day, February 7th, I went to see a show at Spirit despite the cold weather that keeps popping up. It had snowed recently, and I was not in a good mood. In fact, these last two days I have been very depressed. It has not been a good week. This was a good show though.

I got to the venue and talked with my friends from A Deer A Horse. Sorry I'm Dead played with them the last two times they were here. I wasn't playing with them this time, which isn't important to me, but I do really miss that band.


The first band to play was Hearken. I had never seen them before, but it's not dissimilar to Roulette Waves, who I have seen before. Hearken is a stripped down version of that other band, just guitar and drums. The songs were awesome, with rippin' chords and a solid backbeat. The vocals were very raw and Cobain-esque. I enjoyed Hearken more than listening to Nirvana, though.



Next up was A Deer A Horse. They were excellent as always, very heavy and sludgey but not goofy metal stuff. I was really enthralled by the whole thing. They seemed to really fit in that space in that time. Though I couldn't tell you much about the lyrics, I felt very connected to the emphatic vocals.



The last band was Derider. I've only seen them once before, the time that I took a picture that was later stolen by Andy Mulkerin and used on Anthony Bourdain's website for Parts Unknown. That was bullshit. Both of the times seeing Derider have been cool though. This time they opened with two songs that really reminded me of Sonic Youth. Last time seemed a bit more chaotic overall. This set ended with a more structured song that might be the one they used in a video I saw some time ago. It was all good.

After Derider, I stuck around for a while, talking with many friends. Originally, Maenads were also going to play, but they couldn't do to actual physical injuries. Despite that, the other members still came out to the show. I'd like to see these pop-punk bands that always cancel at the very last minute offer that kind of support.

The show made me feel much better. Someone said something very nice about Sorry I'm Dead. The show was already great, but that really made a difference to me. I mean, I thought we were the best. It was nice to hear that from someone else too. Hopefully, I can put something together again soon instead of being so sad and lonely all the time.

Pittsburgh's Brightside has been around for a while. I've seen them a few times, though not recently, and I always thought they were pretty good. Originally they had a more pop-punk sound, but their new single (or maybe it's a two song EP), Two Songs, shows how they have grown from those roots.


The cover looks like something you might see in a science classroom in a movie. I like the shapes on the right side, the skull, and the various colors. It's somewhat jarring seeing the more 3D sphere compared with the comic book skull. It seems as if the attempt is to show various basics of art and to say that it revolves around death. I'm reaching a bit, but it isn't a bad cover anyway.

The first of the Two Songs is "Is This Real Life?", a very poppy number with a very dreamy reverb. I can hear the Milky Way above my head, y'know? The vocals sound like Free Pizza, and the musick is not dissimilar to later-era Dinosaur Jr. or a more rock R.E.M. from their early years. I like the line, "let me show you dreamland." After a pause in the song, the beat takes a dance move to an early 2000s sound but reverts back shortly. Then the song ends somewhat abruptly. It's a very catchy song, though, so it's sticking in my head.

The second of the Two Songs is "Speedball". It's one of these songs comparing love and drug addiction. I'm not a huge fan of this, especially this self-sacrifice emo version. I also don't find a lot of this as interesting as the first song, but the guitar has many very cool solos that make up for the rest of the track. It's still a very catchy track, and I had that chorus stuck in my head well after listening to it.

Brightside has produced quite a pop album with a surface-level post-punk sound combined with their pop-punk roots. It sounds like something that could be on the radio right now, surprising for a more rock-based sound. I love the starfield lyrics and the matching reverb that reaches all the way out to space to touch the King of All Cosmos or Saint Seiya. I wonder how Brightside will continue to evolve? Speaking of their sound right now, Two Songs receives a Good.

I have been following the Pittsburgh-based Soda Club since they started. I thought the name and look were so cool and twee. Somehow, I have never seen them live, though I have planned to go to quite a few shows that somehow my presence never materialized at. They just released an EP, Enjoy, on February 2nd. "Oh that could be cool," I thought. And here is my review.


The album cover of Enjoy is a little pencil drawing of a garden with vegetables and bees as mentioned in one of the EP's tracks. It's a little cutesy, and something seems off with the perspective on the top of the wall. I really like the linework and watercolor though. I feel like this would look pretty good in reality, particularly on a 7" record.



 Enjoy starts out with "Halloween Party", a slow, doo-wop song that recalls older Pittsburgh janglers Actual Size. It's more melodic and soft than that though. I love the saxophone on here, and the drums sound very nice. The band goes quiet and comes back with a Clarence Clemons solo. The lyrics make me sad a bit. "Been Down" starts slow with downer lyrics, but the speed picks up with the words. This song was really cute. It made me feel better about myself actually. I love this line - "If you wanna be a beekeeper, I will help you keep those bees."

"Stone Soup" has a romantic sound, a tale of life as a paper poem. It has a dark edge to it in a way, "Our laughter, then silence, followed by tears and violence." To me, it sounds like it's about accepting that the world changes and people come and go; things change from bad to good. The end has a back and forth segment between the two vocalists. The final track is titled "Haunter". It is a very stark, slow tune of slight peril. It gets faster at the end with lyrics about just living for the moment and, unfortunately, not living for yrself.

It was nice to finally hear Soda Club. The musick was overall what I expected, lyrics that are both sad and joyous with various twists. The songs seem more poetic than the standard rock fare and have a very nice lyrical composition. I like the simple instrumentation - even a ukelele sounds pretty good here! At just four songs, Enjoy is a compact listen; I get the feeling it would get drawn out if it continued like this for much longer. As it is, Enjoy receives a Good.

I went downtown for the gallery crawl on January 26th. I never know when these downtown gallery crawls happen usually, so it was a surprise to find out about this one way in advance. Soon after I heard about the gallery crawl, I also was informed about a band playing down there, so I figured I would check that out.


The band is called Today is the Best Day Ever, a name that I think is way too long and kind of weird, however it is kind of cute. I will say, "Guys, you should probably capitalize the word "is" in yr band name, as it is a verb and not a preposition or article," but, well, it's not my band. Anyway, Today is the Best Day Ever is an emo/indie rock band similar to Shin Guard, who I reviewed last time. Don't worry, this still isn't really a genre I like. However, despite being curmudgeonly against these types of things, the band was okay. They kind of do that sing-song singing that I hate. The instruments are fine. Most interesting to me, in a way, was that most of the lyrics seem to be about drug overdoses and suicide attempts. I was able to read some of them, as they were hung up on the walls of Future Tenant. The band even made a clear statement about the importance of mental health and getting help, which I found very commendable.

I met up with some friends soon after. We tried to go to CAPA, a performing arts school that was participating in the gallery crawl, but a security guard said that it was closed. We were there later in the evening. Instead, we went to the Wood Street Galleries.

After climbing many steps and being a little confused, we saw part of an eerie movie playing upstairs. As I entered the room, I felt very vulnerable, all these people in the darkness staring my way. They were actually watching the film; it was nearly impossible to see people entering the room. The film showed outlines of various subjects, such as animals and people, morphing into other things. One of the scenes particularly showed a crowd, which makes me think that the setup was intentional. Perhaps the goal was to illustrate a feeling of depersonalization and isolation within a group. I hope to go back soon and see the whole film.

Finally, we went to Space, another gallery basically across the street. I really like this gallery; I like the setup, and I think they bring in interesting art. It also reminds me of seeing Carsickness with all of the early Pittsburgh punk stuff. That was really a great show.

Emilie Stark-Menneg

Paul Mullins

Surya Gied

Jenson Leonard

Jason LaCroix

Devan Shimoyama

Thad Kellstadt

This show was a bit different. It was mostly paintings and created by seven different artists. They each had their own style that was very distinguishable from the others. I really enjoyed Surya Gied's  paintings that suggested the shapes of crowds. Emilie Stark-Menneg has a whimsical, soft style that is somewhat off-putting at first but something I like a lot actually. Thad Kellstadt's shelves also had an element of whimsy to them with more bright colors and odd shapes like a cartoon from the 1960s. And I loved the patterns of Jason LaCroix with their repetition and colors. I have mixed feelings about Jenson Leonard's display of collages showing various internet memes juxtaposed together with other pop culture pieces. I think it's kind of cool because it is itself kind of what a meme is except used in a fine art way. It's very relevant to current trends. I hate memes though. I'm just neutral towards Paul Mullins' body parts collages. I feel like they lack focus. Devon Shimoyama seemed to have the main area of interest with their own small room. These pieces, with their figure of a purple man with a quiff, made me think of Prince.

According to Lissa Brennan of the City Paper, who did a much more in-depth review of this show, the curator had written something about how the paintings "present a working duration that attempts to respond to the surface of things.” I don't think this statement is totally bogus, but it is very vague. I didn't even see this statement, as there was so much to look at and so many people in the gallery that I felt a bit overwhelmed. I think the most unifying aspect of this show was the overall use of bright colors and tendency towards somewhat scrambled images, either displayed through a, so to speak, soft filter or through a more literal jumble of objects or pictures.

I stayed downtown with my friends for a bit, but it started to get really cold. Instead of sticking around, hanging out, I decided to go home and think about the show and finish some work. I hope to make it out to one of these again.

Last week, someone sent an EP for review to the Skull Valley page. The sender described their band, Shin Guard, as a Pittsburgh-based post-hardcore band. "Well I owe it to this person to review it," I thought to myself, "but unfortunately I don't think I am going to like it." It didn't turn out so bad.


The cover of Shin Guard's Five Songs is okay. It's not great, but it's not bad either. I like the desaturated look, like porcelain or a colorized pfoto from a century ago. The pale color denotes a fragility to the image. Originally, I thought that the closeup of a nosebleed was way too similar to the infamous cover to Andrew W.K.'s I Get Wet. After looking at that cover again, there are actually very little similarities other than the nosebleed. Since that is the main focus, it's still kind of weird, but I think that a nosebleed makes sense considering the songs. When I think of someone having a nosebleed, I think of anxiousness, fights, embarrassment, or drug use; all of these things are relevant to the teenage problems expressed on this album. In that light, the cover is actually a good choice.


The first track of the Five Songs is "Bemis Point", seemingly a misspelling of the village Bemus Point, NY on the shores of Lake Chautauqua. The lyrics describe a failed relationship involving self-harm and maybe suicide. I don't think much of the lyrics here, but the musick is good! It has a more 90s sound than I expected, the guitar jangling like a less jammy Dinosaur Jr or a more rocking Julianna Hatfield Three. The vocals almost hit that unbearable pop-punk sing-song region but stray far enough away that it's just more of a standard pop style. I don't like "Corsages", at least the beginning. The screaming vocals sound somewhat comical, cheesy, and overdramatic. It has the same kind of lyrics as the previous song. Again though, the musick is really nice. I really like the fuzzy guitar and the snappy drums. The clean backing vocals add a nice touch as well.

On the third track, "You Turned Everything to Paper", I realized two things. First, there are only four songs here. Second, all the songs really are about breakups; it plainly says that. Anyway, "You Turned Everything to Paper", which I really wish was called "Everything Turns to Paper", reminds me of an anime I watched called Sola. Like this, it was also a little overdramatic, though the main things I remember are a character that seemed to be a vampire getting some juice from a vending machine and a really weird twist in the plot, similar to the title of this song, that made me uninterested in finishing it at the time. This track is way different than the others, a spoken word piece with ambient sounds behind. It flows really nicely, and there are some awesome sounds here too. The final track "Flubline" has more awful screaming vocals. I really like the drum sound, but the guitar sounds more generic. It's still not bad. I really can't stand the screaming vocals, though. Even beyond my standard dislike of screamy-ness, the delivery is weird. The weird glitchy feedback at the end is so awesome.

Where's the fifth song? Maybe it's a statement on loneliness, incompleteness. Maybe it's some kind of post-modern, internet-age reference to Fugazi's habit of naming albums after the number of songs. I found it interesting that it wasn't there.

Five Songs was better than I expected. As I said above, I generally don't like post-hardcore (along with emo, pop-punk, trap rap, death (and other kinds of) metal, D-beat/crust, hardcore, or modern pop country). There are always exceptions, though. While I still didn't love the vocals or the lyrics, and really didn't like the screaming vocals, I do think that Shin Guard did a good job. Though I don't really listen to this kind of musick, the tracks on Five Songs were different enough to be interesting. I really liked that there was a poem on here, and I thought the production sounded great. If you are a fan of these genres, I think you would really like this EP. Five Songs gets a Good.
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This weekend, I've been all screwed up on anime and Street Fighter. I also practiced driving, Japanese, and the mixolydian scale on guitar. These are good things. Still I was all screwed up, bleary-eyed at dawn with visions of school girls firing energy blasts at muscular men in white karate gis. Do monsters stalk street corners at night? Did Elvis die? These are questions that need answers. You won't find the answers here.

While salarymen costumed themselves in ties and black trousers, I did sit up wondering what the hell I was doing these days. After putting my own weird wardrobe of punk/closet-queer boy/rockabilly/nerd junk away, I found something that took me back to older bleary-eyed days of night-time mysteries. Many years ago, a friend and I would sit up all night discussing the paranormal and the supernatural, and one day he handed me a really weird little booklet. I don't know if it was serious or not, but the text described a robotic killer or something that was thought to come from a university, I think CMU. I never really read the whole thing. Well it turns out that I live a few blocks from a robot lab owned by CMU. There have certainly been nights where I walked past the walls and wondered what dastardly replicants were being assembed inside that would one day be dismantled by a post-noir detective in our increasingly cyberpunk world. Just the other day, I posted a picture of some ugly, boxy, condos that look like they'd exist in that same time and place. These things are coming up all over. Truly the future has arrived.

Of course the future was already here in some form as Robotic Music of Pittsburgh proves. This record was released back in October of 2009 on the mysterious Specific Recordings, but Bandcamp threw it out to me as a "new arrival". It must be fate! I think it's really just only been now posted on Bandcamp.


Robotic Music of Pittsburgh is an album of musick "played on physical instruments by robotic or mechatronic performers". The cover is a throwback to the harsh Pittsburgh of yesteryear when steel was the king and everybody died with lungs full of soot. You could ask my great-grandfather about it if you were dead. Thank God that that orange guy is bringing all the soot back, so we can all ask my great-grandfather about the steel mills and stuff once we are dead. Thank God for environmental waste and a backstep for human health! Thank God (or Christ) for the bomb. I like the cover to this album.


The album starts with a track by Richard Pell and Matthew Mesner called "Robotic Player Piano". "Monday, January 4th 1999", a voice says, and then it's all controlled chaos of flying ivory keys. There's a swirly mid-range with twinkling somethings above. The first track is not even a minute long.

The second track is attributed to Ben Brown, Garth Zeglin, and Roger Dannenburg and titled "McBlare Robotic Bagpipes". It's another short track, sounding like something John Cale might have produced on viola. The machines drone and blare. They don't rock.

The longest track is "GuitarBot" by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. It's quite beautiful. I love the sliding guitars, all hollow and slimy, accompanied by a bullish upright bass. As the song continues, it sounds as if there is a keyboard or an EBow or just some really extreme sustain. The musick ranges from meditative to jolting.

After a brief silence, Jeremy Boyle w/ Robotic Guitar and Drums produce a track of the same name. This is the final piece of musick on the album, and it is the most like a typical song. The machines really can rock. The guitar rolls over in waves as the drums sound, well, like clockwork. Some other guitars come in with a counterpoint and semi-solo. There might be a keyboard here, or it is another guitar all covered in amber light. I enjoyed this one very much.

I'm glad that I found this sampler of Robotic Music of Pittsburgh. There is an air of mystery to it. I could not find much information other than a short article written by Manny Theiner for the City Paper concerning the output of the label. Specific Recordings is certainly something I will watch out for from now on. The robots here on Robotic Music of Pittsburgh do a good job at making musick. Were any of them built close by? Label owner Richard Pell does have connections to CMU, so there is certainly a chance. Thus the mystery of the man-eating robots of CMU was finally solved. They are really just musicians taking all the gigs away from human bands. That's just the way of the future, isn't it? Robotic Music of Pittsburgh receives a Good.
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Welcome to the second article in the Outside In(fluence) series of international musick reviews. Last time, I talked about some Chinese punks called Dirty Fingers. This time, it's noise-rockers, Buzz Rodeo, from Stuttgart, Germany. I have been aware of them for some time because I am friends with the frontperson, Ralph, on Facebook. Despite this, I have never really listened to the band before. Since I started the Outside In(fluence) series, I thought this would be a good time to do so.


The album cover to Combine, released in May 2017, has a mechanical feel. It is literally a picture of a piece of machinery with small lightning bolts, but the image is also very clean. I'm not a fan of this type of art; it leaves me feeling empty. It seems like a popular style, but it seems so sterile to me. I do think it suits the band a bit with their mechanical attack.


The first song on Combine is "Cheap Trick", sounding like Albini in more ways than one. The guitars are scratchy sirens and the vocals excitedly wild. There are some nice drum parts here. I know Steve Albini likes the band Cheap Trick quite a bit. I don't think this song is about the band. Next is the speeding-along racer of "Jordan Walk". I really like this song with its imagery of bicycles racing around. Everything goes to chaos before the chorus returns. Then the song ends with the guitar sounding like an electrified cable of many pounds. "Nice Guy" sounds like Sonic Youth meets Big Black and My Dad Is Dead. "The Song in A" has more raw power cable guitar. The bass has a weird, ghoulish sound. The drums sound good but kind of thin. The bass a subtle creepiness from under the waves of guitar. "Pride Parade" does not refer to a pro-LGBT event but to self-congratulatory, arrogant rockstars. I was glad to hear a short break of near silence on this, as the album has been going on full blast since it started. There is at least one German word here that is repeated often. I think it is "hofnarr" meaning a fool or jester. I had to look up the translation, but it makes sense. "Tripwire!" is heavy and droney, and I like it a lot. I don't know what it is about though.

The second side begins with the Dick Dale guitar of "Brompton Stone". This one reminded me a lot of Multicult with its throbbing mid-range bass and screeching guitar. "Spinning" is a little quieter. I get tired of all the yelling and stuff, though this is still along those lines. The guitar does some cool stuff, alternating between a start/stop Ramones rock and a Sonic Youth galactic attack. "Next Position" sounds like it has something to do with sex or fascism, but I think I'm missing something. I thought this song was somewhat tiring. "Rubdown" is more guitar attack. I wish the drums were more prominent. "Butchers Knife" starts with an interesting effect that's been on a few songs, a kind of tremolo or something, some kind of stutter on the guitar at the end of the notes. The musick is the poppiest it's been on the entire album, Ralph, the vocalist, nearly crooning in his own way. This one is my favorite on the album. It reminds me of Iggy Pop's The Idiot and Gang of Four. I wish more of the album had been like this.

Buzz Rodeo is a very skilled band. They make some cool sounds. I just wish they had more varied songs. "Butcher's Knife" proves they can do more than just yelling b/w loud guitars. I love that song, so much. I can't say much for the rest. Combine gets a Neutral. It doesn't do enough for me, mostly a slight headache.
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